War and peace: the peril of complacency

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and in the mirror, China’s President Xi Jinping. ‘The protagonists of 1914 were sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world,’ writes Christopher Clark.
Photo: AFP

When President
Barack Obama
visits Japan this week, at the start of an Asian tour that will take him to various countries on China’s periphery, he will be making a big statement and one that will reverberate in regional capitals, including Canberra. American officials insist Obama’s Asian tour is not designed to convey a message that the US is intent on containing a rising China.

But inevitably his engagement with the leaders of Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Malaysia will be regarded as part of American attempts to bolster its allies against a regional hegemon.

Beijing may have been left off the presidential itinerary because Obama has exchanged reciprocal visits with Chinese leaders recently, but concerns about a rapidly industrialising and militarising China will dominate his talks with Asian counterparts, including ways in which Beijing might be accommodated without yielding to its bullying.

China, which has been flexing its might in territorial disputes with Japan and the Philippines, as well as in trade and investment deals, needs to be accommodated. In what seems like the blink of an eye China has emerged as the world’s second-largest economy. On its present trajectory it will be the biggest within a decade, surpassing the United States.

In China’s rise of the past four decades, successive Chinese leaders have heeded Deng Xiaoping, the architect of modern China, whose foreign policy advice was to “keep a low profile and hide one’s ­brightness". But this advice would seem to have outlived its purpose even if Chinese leaders want to maintain the illusion that China’s rise is benign. Clearly, it’s not, nor is it necessarily as disruptive as some of its critics would have you believe.

Obama’s challenge is finding the right balance between accommodation and confrontation in how he responds to the emergence of this second world power.

All this is prompting a search for historical comparisons of what is an extraordinary turn of events unmatched in human history and whether this could lead to another war.

China’s economic might is being matched with big spending on its military, second only to the US, albeit a distant second.

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The question is whether conflict is inevitable and what might be done to forestall such a catastrophe that recalls, for some, the terrible events of 1914 when Europe slid towards World War I, a war that made little sense then, and even less now.

There were a staggering 20 million civilian and military deaths in the Great War, including more than 60,000 Australians, 2 million Germans, 1.7 million Russians, 1.3 million French and three-quarters of a million Britons.

This colossal waste, scarcely believable 100 years later, has prompted debate in academic circles about the war’s origin.

The biggest error in modern history

It has been led by Harvard professor Niall Ferguson whose book The Pity of War and subsequent BBC television program argue that Britain’s participation was unnecessary, certainly in the war’s early stages.

In Ferguson’s words: “We should not think of this as some great victory or dreadful crime, but more as the biggest error in modern history.’’ Fellow academics have set upon him and argue that Britain had no choice but to confront Germany before it gained a stranglehold on Europe.

But Ferguson does draw support from the Australian-born Christopher Clark in his acclaimed book The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914.’

Clark’s thesis is that European leaders “muddled’’ their way into the war and then found it impossible to put an end to the carnage until one side had been fought to a standstill. Worryingly, Clark sees parallels between then and now.

“Our world is getting more like 1914," he said in Germany last year. “We are no longer in a world that is disciplined by the standoff between two nuclear hyper-powers. What we are drifting back to is a poly­centric world with many sources of conflict." These are dangerous circumstances – potentially – and might be compared with the fragile Concert of Europe of the early 20th century that unravelled in the ­pistol shot heard around the world that felled Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in July 1914.

It may seem a stretch to liken territorial conflict in the East China Sea of 2014 to the Balkans of 1914, but it’s not beyond possibility that a dispute over the barely habitable Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands between Japan and China might provoke a wider conflagration.

In January, Japan’s Prime Minister
Shinzo Abe
moved the debate about Asia 2014 and Europe 1914 to centre-stage regionally when he drew comparisons in a discussion with newspaper editors in Davos between latter-day China and pre-World War I Germany.

This drew a quick rebuke from the ­Chinese, who accused Abe of seeking to deflect attention from Japan’s own record of aggression. But the Japanese prime minister had a point. Parallels do exist between a rising China and pre-World War I Germany.

A resurgent, industrialising Germany found itself bumping up against a Britain that ruled the waves and commanded an empire on which the sun never set. Germany like China felt constrained, even encircled.

Alarmists have made a cottage industry of predicting a “coming conflict with China".

At this stage there’s no compelling reason to believe these predictions will come to pass, but nor should we ignore the risks of mishap and miscalculation in a region riven by historical enmities and tensions.

History does repeat

Let history be our guide.

Graham Allison of Harvard’s Kennedy School has studied 15 cases of rising and status quo powers bumping up against each other. In 11 of those cases war resulted.

Allison refers to this phenomenon as the Thucydides Trap in which conflict becomes preordained between a rising power and an established power.

As he puts it on the eve of the Great War anniversary: “The historian’s metaphor reminds us of the dangers two parties face when a rising power rivals a ruling power – as Athens did in the 5th century BC and Germany did at the end of the 19th century. Most challenges have ended in war."

Former prime minister
Kevin Rudd
, now visiting fellow at Harvard, addressed the “inevitability of war" issue in a speech at the German Historical Museum in Berlin on April 10.

“For me this is about being alert to the reality that profound change can happen suddenly and that we should not simply be seduced into complacency that peace is somehow a natural condition of humankind because it has been that way for so long," he said.

Rudd highlighted that European leaders in the lead-up to World War I did not see war coming. Complacency had settled over Europe and spread to the dominions even as the “war to end all wars" was about to wreak its vengeance.

Germany’s kaiser-era chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg believed the countries of Europe were “in harmony" and “no troubles are now anticipated". That statement was made on January 1, 1914. Two days later, Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, David Lloyd George, later prime minister, described circumstances in Europe as the “most favourable moment that has presented itself in the past 20 years".

Many years later Lloyd George in his war memoirs conceded “we muddled into war". His words add credibility to Clark’s conclusions. How could informed opinion have got it so wrong and at such terrible cost to all concerned, including Australia?

Clark has no doubt that lack of awareness among leaders of the potential costs underlay fateful steps taken until it was too late. Harvard professor Joseph Nye addressed this crystal ball issue earlier this year in an article titled 1914 Revisited?

“Today’s world is different from the world of 1914 in several important ways," Nye notes. “One is that nuclear weapons give political leaders the equivalent of a crystal ball that shows what their world would look like after escalation.

“Certainly the crystal-ball effect had a strong influence on US and Soviet leaders during the Cuban missile crisis. It would likely have a similar influence on US and ­Chinese leaders today."

We might be more sanguine about this if it were not for an escalating arms race in Asia.

In Davos, Abe drew attention to the risks of an old-fashioned arms race and called for a curb on regional military spending.

These remarks were aimed primarily at China but could have been applied more generally.

Japan itself is rearming in response to China’s increasing military preparedness.

“The dividend of growth in Asia must not be wasted on military expansion,’’ Abe said. “We must use it to invest in human capital, which will further boost growth in the region.’’

Asian countries ramp up defence

The Financial Times noted earlier this month that against a background of China increasing its defence budget eightfold over the past two decades, countries across Asia, including Australia, are ramping up defence outlays. In 2012, for the first time in the modern era, Asian states spent more on defence than Europe.

While US military spending dwarfs that of the rest of the world combined – the US spends about $US600 billion annually compared with China’s $US112 billion – the ­Chinese have made significant strides in their ability to constrain the United States’ ability to intervene in naval conflicts that may arise over disputed territory in places like the East China Sea and the South China Sea.

All this against a backdrop of worrying tensions elsewhere in the world.

While the US has declared a pivot towards Asia, Russia is instituting its own Far East “pivot" as it grapples with fallout from its seizure of Crimea from Ukraine.

Western nations have applied sanctions to Russia following its annexation of Crimea. This is likely to push Russia towards ­enhancing its commercial ties with China, South Korea and Japan, particularly for its oil and gas.

This past week, Russia announced it would write off 90 per cent of North Korea’s. The move was debt aimed at getting Pyongyang’s co-operation for a pipeline across its territory to supply hydrocarbons to South Korea and Japan.

Russia’s President
Vladimir Putin
has made no secret of his ambitions on Russia’s Pacific periphery. It might be overlooked, but Russia is a European, Central Asian and Pacific power, and cannot be excluded from calculations about what might transpire in our region when considering rising global tensions.

In March, at the Australian National University, strategic thinkers gathered to debate the topic, “Asia Today – 1914 Redux".

Michael Wesley, Joan Beaumont, Hugh White and Evelyn Goh did not reach hard and fast conclusions beyond agreement that 2014, in White’s words, “sees the end of a ­sustained period of uncontested US primacy’’ in the world.

The ANU scholars were dubious about comparisons between 2014 and 1914, but none discounted the possibility of conflict.

As Evelyn Goh noted: “East Asia is a region of much unfinished business [including tensions between China and Japan that date from the 16th century]."

Perhaps the last word should rest with the acknowledged authority on the origins of World War I. Decrying the “glibness" of those leaders in pre-war Europe who might have known better, Clark writes:

“In this sense, the protagonists of 1914 were sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world."